Characters with numerous layers and dimensions have been shown extensively in William Shakespeare's plays. As the plays progressed, the many features of the characters continued to disclose transformations that separated them from a static identity and revealed the various shades that incorporated some fresh visions about the characters to the audience or readership. William Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the most famous problem plays in the history of drama. Hamlet is "the most inventive of those who have undertaken such a study to be the idol of every country in which the literature of England has been cultivated," according to legendary litterateur Coleridge (Conolly 4). In every nook of the play, a problem could be identified. The protagonist of this play, Hamlet- the Prince of Denmark is probably the most dramatically evolved character in this play. His delayed actions, his fanatical approach, his ill treatment towards Ophelia, his studentship at the age of thirty, his professing uncertainty of shams regarding beyond death in spite of his conversation with the spectre etc. questions hover over the character of Hamlet. The character of Hamlet is most fascinating for the ambiguities it portrays in the play. The dramatic persona of Hamlet constructs the most vital base of the play on which the superstructure of this drama stands with its sparkling glory. This paper would attempt to provide a detailed sketch of Hamlet’s character with a close reference to the text and relevant dialogues or soliloquies. Hamlet’s dialogues and soliloquies will play the key role to depict the character of Hamlet in this essay.
The prince of Denmark, Hamlet, is distressed by the demise of his father. The following event of his uncle Claudius’s rise as a successor of the kingdom and his marriage to Hamlet’s mother Gertrude adds into his depression. Dearest to the general population, he is thirty years of age, an outstanding fencer, an understudy at the college in Wittenberg, reflective, and suspicious. He is enamored with Ophelia and has been pursuing her. He continues to remain in his grieving garments in spite of the royal and illustrious wedding and wishes to come back to Wittenberg to escape this new Denmark. For all intents and purposes self-destructive attitude, he is energized to activity by the news that his dad's apparition has been seen, however, he is sufficiently suspicious to twofold check the cases of the ones who have seen it. This absence of sympathy toward his life is sufficiently solid, in any case, that he couldn't care less what peril the apparition may lead him to. The phantom's disclosure that he was killed by Claudius, gives Hamlet an explanation behind his contempt of his uncle. He chooses to pretend as an insane to deflect doubt, and at times really slips into a genuine frenzy. He utilizes his franticness as a permit to talk his true feeling about Polonius. Exceptionally sharp, he gets on to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's central goal inside a couple sentences and runs rings around their endeavours to analyse him. He has an incredible love of plays, knowing the characters closely and having heard them perform plays never performed before, and additionally knowing precisely what play exists to trap Claudius, composing lines to be added to it, and having a lot of exhortation on the proper behaviour for the experts. His abhorring of his uncle is instinctive, and he likewise releases abhorrence for himself, ladies, cosmetics, and his traitorous companions. He is appalled at the possibility of his mom having intercourse, trusting that moderately aged women don't feel covet. His disdain for Claudius drives him to do without a phenomenal chance to slaughter him, out of worry that his uncle may wind up in paradise rather than damnation.
Hamlet’s initial soliloquy indicates his extensive melancholy, much anxious than could be found in any other part of the play: “O, that this too too solid flesh would / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, / Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His cannon ’gainst self- slaughter. O God, God, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (48). In the commencement, his intentions and emotions are comprehensible and indicate the impact of the ghost’s encounter with Hamlet. Hamlet is merely appalled that previously his mother had seemed to be devoted to his father, has now wedded Claudius, her immensely substandard ex- brother-in-law. For Hamlet, as the drama starts, survival itself is a trouble; he desires that the body just melts away and consequently liberates him from his agony. Even though at times his oratory in the consequent parts of the drama reverberates with this initial assertion of desolation, Hamlet's earnestness becomes additionally complicated to critic once he has acknowledged his paranormal charge. Hamlet is a person “of marked ability and peculiar sensitiveness of temperament, labouring painfully in a business or profession for which he is thoroughly unfitted, and for which he has no liking, the details and drudgery of which are only irksome to him” (Wood 22). Therefore, his temperament gradually becomes more frenzied; his words more fiery and punning, also his impetus become considerably baffling.
The social context of Hamlet’s perception rests on a worldview of negativity. In act two, while talking to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, Hamlet gives his precise view that reveals his critique of futility and innate bitterness towards man’s all greatly perceived actions in comparison to the greater force of the universe. Here he says:
“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire- why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man: how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable: in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me- no, nor woman neither” (77).
In this speech, Hamlet utilizes his paradoxical angel- like trepidation to define the worthlessness of the humans. He clearly places his species in a standard of the Renaissance universe, rising progressively from the earth to the sky, and denies this chain of command. This discourse is regularly referred to, as an announcement of Hamlet's profound despairing - like the talk in Act One - yet here his despairing is far bigger than his current conditions. His despairing is supernatural in nature and grandiose in degree. As the drama advances, “Hamlet undergoes a process of maturation, the successful outcome of which we witness in the serene and capable figure of act V” (Russell 211). As of now, he has outgrown the nonexclusive assignment before him, to slaughter his uncle, and has utilized the event of requital and franticness to investigate substantially bigger inquiries regarding the place of mankind in the universe.
Hamlet’s character is more centred on the psychological or psychoanalytical zone rather than a plain social or historical domain. His all dialogues and soliloquies carve out Hamlet’s character beautifully by indicating the complications, paradoxes, turmoil and indecisiveness Hamlet has been suffering from. He is extremely emotional and driven by impulses. In his second soliloquy, he expresses his shuddered state of mind, on the tale of a fiction “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!/ Is it not monstrous that this player here,/ But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,/ Could force his soul so to his own conceit/ That from her working all his visage waned,/ Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,/ A broken voice, and his whole function suiting/ With forms to his conceit; and all for nothing! For Hecuba!” (83). Hamlet's second speech reveals the very substance of Hamlet's actual clash. For he is undoubtedly dedicated to looking for retribution for his father, yet he can't follow up in the interest of his father because of his aversion toward removing that cool and computing revenge. Hamlet's feeling of himself as a defeatist is gotten from a rough, short-sighted judgment turning on regardless of whether he has yet made any move against the man who killed his dad. His self-judgment takes a few unusual structures, including dramatic imaginings of a progression of belittling abuse that he ingests like a quitter since he feels he has done nothing to deliver retribution on Claudius.
Resolved to persuade himself to do the planned murder of his uncle, Hamlet works himself into a craze. He trusts that his interests will stop his better judgment and he will then have the capacity to charge forward and slaughter Claudius decisively. In any case, Hamlet again neglects to subdue his worries of submitting homicide and can't act quickly. So he next tries to concentrate his consideration on an arrangement to guarantee Claudius concedes his own blame. He comes back to a thought that had entered his thoughts before - that of arranging the play ‘The Mousetrap’. Hamlet is persuaded by this notion, as Claudius watches a re-authorization of his wrongdoing; he will without a doubt uncover his own particular blame. Hamlet cannot take the expression of his father's apparition, who truly may be "the devil", deceiving him into accusing himself. In this way, he should have more material evidence before he ends Claudius' life - he should "catch the conscience of the king" (84).
This essay concludes with the most discussed oratory by Hamlet, “To be, or not to be; that is the question:-/ Whether’t is nobler in the mind, to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune;/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing end them? – To die, - to sleep, -/ No more; - and, by a sleep, to say we end/ The heart- ache, and the thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to, - ‘t is a consummation/ Devoutly to be wish’d. To die; - to sleep: -/ To sleep! Perchance to dream: ay there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil” (86- 87). The discourse suggests that demise is an exceedingly appealing goal and that the main thing that shields us hopeless mortals from searching it out is the dread of "what dreams may come" in the great beyond. Be that as it may, surely the discourse is more than a basic suicide note. On the off chance that he is considering suicide, he is without a doubt examining it in theory, as a point of intrigue more than as a genuine choice for his own life. A few scholars have chosen that the discourse is not about suicide by any means. To take one case, the eighteenth-century scholar Samuel Johnson recommended that the monologue is all the more by and large about death, and about the danger of death in a snapshot of definitive activity, than about suicide.
Hamlet is astounding and shocking, and, subsequently, jumbling in light of the fact that he subverts others' desires and never responds with an anticipated reaction to his own feelings or the desires of different characters. It is significant that it is not exclusively Hamlet's interested discourse that estranges others. Hamlet's fanatical cynicism likewise starts to influence the greater part of his connections and turns into an expansive piece of his identity as a character. In a generally shallow discussion with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet demands that Denmark is a jail and that the world itself has turned into a "foul and pestilent/assembly of vapors" (77), and he presses the men to clarify why they would need to visit him in the place that torments him. Village's association with his mom is likewise upsetting. While he is supported in scrutinizing her choice to wed Claudius before her better half's cadaver has even cooled, Hamlet is mocking and belittling towards her, inciting her to ask "What have I done, that thou darest/sway thy tongue/In clamor so discourteous against me?". To put it plainly, these short, laconic and regularly wry connections with different characters help characterize Hamlet as a sceptical character and cause the audience or the readers to expect that his view of occasions will be, quite often, blurred with this trademark haziness of tone. Hamlet’s character and its development throughout the play indicates one underlined universal truth about life that in spite of possessing immense talent and versatility to act in unusual ways, “Hamlet cannot transcend the limitations of the world he has inherited, cannot go beyond its bourns. So he will die there, a flawed, mortal man” (Thompson & Taylor 171).
Works Cited
Conolly, John. A Study of Hamlet. LDN, London: Edward Moxon & Co. 1863. Print.
Russell, John. Hamlet and Narcissus. DE, Delaware: University of Delaware Press. 1995. Print.
Thompson, Ann & Neil Taylor. Hamlet : A Critical Reader. LDN, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
2016. Print.
Wood, William Dyson. Hamlet : From a Psychological Point of View, Volume 12. LDN, London:
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. 1870. Print.
